department of dubious dreamery

Recently, INTERN has been noticing a curious trend in YA author interviews: authors who attribute their inspiration for a character or an entire novel to a dream.

By now, everyone is (over-)familiar with the Stephenie Meyer Legend: had dream about sparkly vampire and unsparkly girl discussing the intricacies of sparkly/non-sparkly love, woke up, penned four-book series, laughed hysterically all the way to the blood bank. (Cue wannabe bestselling vampire authors everywhere popping Nyquil and repairing to their beds.)

When she first heard of this Legend, INTERN thought it was an unusual story. But since then, INTERN has stumbled upon tons of YA authors who claim to have discovered their novels in a dream.

While INTERN doesn't doubt that these YA ladies are telling the truth about their nocturnal inspiration, she can't help but smell some kind of culture-bound fish. INTERN wouldn't be surprised if, in five or ten years from now, dreams had passed out of vogue and authors were instead pointing to mescaline trips or divination as the source of their ideas for novels. Creativity is a mysterious thing, and the collective story we tell ourselves about it is as prone to shifting over time as the collective story we tell ourselves about diseases or gravity or gender or fruit flies.

So why dreams? Why now? Why not "my cat beamed the story to me telepathically" or "I've been working on this @$!#@ manuscript for so long I don't even remember how I originally thought of it"?

This dream thing has something innately glamorous and weirdly flattering about it, while managing to be humble at the same time. It says "I am subject to bursts of divine inspiration!" but also "I really can't take credit for this—twas the dream!" That's a pretty appealing story. Best of all, it's an acceptable explanation within our society—one that doesn't make you sound either calculating or insane.

Before she returns to boar hunting, INTERN wants to know: What do you make of this whole YA Novels Based on Dreams phenomenon? Do you get your inspiration from your REM cycle? Is this dream thing a convenient explanation or the gospel truth?

Just out of interest, the inspiration for Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN was a dream so perhaps its not such a new concept after all? Apparently, Bram Stoker also had a dream that may have inspired DRACULA.

So, let's say I'm a YA sort of person, and I'm looking at two vampirish books. One was inspired by a dream, and the characters came alive and told the author what to write. The other was the result of the author sitting for 6 hours a day at the computer, whether or not any words came out -- 90 percent perspiration, etc. Which book sounds better? Truer? More magical? More Romantic?

Be careful with the boar hunting. My only (fictional) experience with that was Lord of the Flies, and that didn't work out so well for everyone.

The subconcious is a great source of material for a novel. As is almost everything else around us. A seed for a story can come from everywhere, and as writers, it would do us well to listen and pick up on them, regardless of the source. Quite a few writing books will remind us of this too.

Citing dreams as a source seems rather prevalent in the YA genre right now, but I am sure it is not limited to it. I think it just seems this way becaus YA is so popular right now.

Jane: that's true! when you think about something a lot, it's more likely to come up in a dream. there's nothing *wrong* with getting inspiration from dreams—INTERN is just interested in how various explanations of creativity tend to fluctuate in popularity over time.

I tend to agree with Jane. The answers to plot snarls, blind corners and unruly characters are hidden in my subconscious. That said, dreaming and getting something on paper are different. Even Stephanie Meyer had to spend some time in front of the computer.

well, um. the last novel i wrote was started from a dream about evil shadow people crawling out of walls. but, i didn't know the meyer story until now, seriously. I guess i never read how she created her puppies.

What they said. I have dreamed about my characters, but only after working on them until I flirted with carpal tunnel syndrome.

I think this sort of thing happens for real very rarely but gets so absorbed into the collective consciousness that people start to believe it happened to them, too. I can see a dream inspiring a scene; mine can be vivid, terrifying, and violent (I remember those best because they wake me up) but a whole novel is, erm, unlikely.

In fact, I think the Meyer story states something to that effect. She dreamed the scene in the field and wanted to tell the rest of the story. That seems very plausible.

For the most part, I find it more likely that people are co-opting the term "dream" for "daydream."

My dreams and meditations do help with ideas and solutions to my novels. But my inspiration comes from real words and actions of my grown daughters. There's no way I could dream up what they really do... :D

I'm pretty jealous of people who obtain inspiration from their unconsciously creative REM based adventures.

My ideas come from a lot of hard work and arduous *thinking*, ugh. I tend to dream about things like Tom Hanks eating glass (if only that dream could have been about him talking to a volley ball. What's wrong with my brain?!).

Sometimes while I'm having a dream I'll think would make the best story ever! Then I wake up and think no one wants to read about a post-apocalyptic world populated with people who live in the sky on monkeybar-like structures. :p

I believe Katherine Kurtz's first Deryni fantasy was based on a dream, but I think it mainly provided a couple of images, not a whole plot. That seems more likely as inspiration.

Nowadays we get inspiration from word verifications: mine was "UNBEAST," which would make a great title for a YA vampire story, I'm sure of it!

Great point. This made me think of a couple things:1. YA is incredibly popular right now2. Despite the Franzenfreude, an overwhelming number of YA moneymaker authors are women (Meyer, Rowling, Cabot, Bray, Collins, etc)3. All the links you provided about authors and dreams were for women authors.4. As you said, a dream is a humble way of talking about inspiration5. Women are pwning YA despite still not getting respect in the Literary World. Maybe being humble is their way of minimizing the fact that they are making serious bank and kicking some literary butt!

I think this depends on your definition of REM cycle. Having been around to hear (and purchase) the first of REM's songs (on vinyl!) I see their first cycle as running from the Chronic Town EP through Life's Rich Pageant. (For me, Document started a harder-edged sound that constituted the start of their second cycle. Monster, the furthest extension of that second cycle was the first REM album/CD i didn't buy.)

Unfortunately, the answer remains the same, regardless of which REM cycle you're referring to: No. While I love those early REM albums, I've experienced naught for story inspiration from them.

until now i had only thought of my bed as a place of sleep and competition for space with our cats. i'll have to take another, hard look at the bed tonight and determine if i feel differently about it or not.

i suspect that any plot outlining it produces either bypasses me and goes straight to the cats (thus partially explaining their apparent contempt at my writing) or, perhaps equally as bad, they come to me on those nights when i wake up, completely failing to remember a single moment of any dream.

allow me, however, to offer a possible silver lining: whenever my wife now asks me "are you going to take (another) nap?" i can now answer, "i am offering my writing muse to commune directly with my subconscious. it's called research."

I've had a couple of dreams that would have made awesome stories... I even managed to remember enough about some of them to outline a few. But then I just... didn't get inspired to keep going with them.My best inspirations are the ones that come from many different places. For example in my last novel, the setting was inspired by a trip to the MoMA, the character by a lack of characters like that in YA, and the plot came from watching too many movies with sketchy mafiosos... :D

JenniferWriter: INTERN thinks you're onto something with the dreams being a humble way of talking about talent and success. INTERN did search around for male writers talking about dreams, but the only interviews she found was a male writer who said he "wasn't one of those writers who finds [his] stories in dreams"!

About dudes dreaming: was going to mention Coleridge and Paul McCartney, but it seems the link up above has that covered. I can't think of any male authors off the top of my head that have done the same, though I can't shake the feeling that there's some great work of literature that we all know was inspired by a dream. Proust, or Nabokov?

My own dreams tend to be illogical. One time I dreamt I was fighting with my fiance, and got so mad the dream that I woke myself up with angry. More recently, I dreamed all the (nonexistent) missing scenes from The Godfather and Arrested Development, one after the other. I would not mind having that particular dream again.

Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak is also a dream-inspired book (possibly the creepiest one out there, because she dreamed Melinda SOBBING in the middle of the night.)http://www.shmoop.com/speak-anderson/

It does seem curious that dreams seem to be a gendered source of inspiration. Then again, weirdly, a lot of men I know have absolutely tortured sleep. They're insomniacs or absolutely tortured by nightmares, most of them. Stupid tortured artist types.

I almost never dream about characters, personally. Not sure why. Then again, I don't know if I'd want them showing up in my dreams, either.

Yes! This is something I've been really thinking about lately since I'm revising my urban fantasy novel to be YA after much soul searching and feedback. YA seems to be very much about female writers and female protagonists coming of age, while male writers with male protags often continue to be considered adult literature. I can't help wondering if the Men of the publishing world are more comfortable with women writers so long as they're writing for children and now here is this new "genre" of YA which can be tucked away under "children" and safely away from Adult Literature.

A lot of these women writers are moms, even stay-at-home moms. Saying their inspiration came from a dream is like saying, "I was never in any way LOOKING for a creative outlet beyond motherhood because I'm so happy to be a mom but then this dream FOUND me and I felt that I owed it to the characters to tell their story."

It's an easy way of avoiding any suggestion that these women were looking for success. Almost like it was divine inspiration, not blood, sweat, and tears, which of course it was.

thevillain: a-ha! INTERN knew there was some really really awesome book she was forgetting that was triggered by a dream, and SPEAK is the one.

JenniferWriter: very interesting. there's so many layers here: on the one hand, if an author says she had a dream that inspired a story, INTERN is inclined to believe it at face value—sometimes a dream is just a dream and it's as simple as that.

but another part of INTERN thinks "there has to be something else going on here" (which is why she had to write this post!) the further this conversation goes, the more intriguing the gender angle starts to look.

another possible explanation is simply that while men and women may have equally striking dreams, more women go on to write stories/books based on them. or women are more likely to admit to basing books on dreams (rather than say, Genius). or it could be that we just haven't stumbled across all the examples of male dream-authors yet!

I have a third-draft MG ms that was born of a start-to-finish, movie-style dream I had. I wrote a sequel to it shortly after, and the pair of them are waiting for the day that I re-re-re-revise and submit. Should I be so forunate as to sell them, I won't mind owning to their provenance.

I also have a detailed plot for MG steampunk that came as a ridiculously enjoyable dream; I'll be starting on it once I finish the first draft of my current WIP, and again, I'll happily own up to its origins should I be so fortunate as to ever be in a position where somebody actually cares!

So yes, dream-sourcing of plots definitely happens for me, and I especially enjoy how easy they make that whole initial plotting headache, but I also have plenty of dreams that I know far better than to make into stories and, of course, stories that did not start as dreams. The latter come from things I overhear my students say, from the weirdest moments of my stuck-in-traffic mental breakdowns, and many other flights of fancy that happen during my all-too-awake hours of the day. I love to write way too much to sit around waiting for ideas to pull a kind of reverse Athena-- springing, fully formed, into my head.

Based on my own experience, I am ready to believe any author who says his/her idea came as a dream; I just don't advise that aspiring authors pop fistfuls of Lunesta in hopes that inspiration will follow.

Post a Comment

Hilary T. Smith

POPULAR POSTS

If you've read The Hunger Games (or been in the mute and intensely focused presence of someone in the process of reading it), you know that it's practically impossible to put down. Stephen King compared the book to an arcade game that keeps you helplessly plugging in quarters round after round, and after reading it herself INTERN can say that that's a fair approximation.

What exactly is Suzanne Collins doing, on a sentence-to-sentence, paragraph-to-paragraph level, that makes this book such a terrifyingly addictive read?

To shed light on this question, INTERN repaired to her secret basement Book Lab, where she soaked a randomly-selected chapter of The Hunger Games in a bath of chemicals designed to reveal the exact function of each sentence.

Oh, and what an exciting experiment it was! Within seconds, the words themselves melted away, leaving only bright colors representing the following things:

Here is what Chapter 12 looks like following the experiment. If you have a copy of …

Greetings from Essaouira, Morocco. Over the past two months, I have mentally composed so many little missives to post here, but somehow they all grew worn and stale before making it online, like letters that seem to wilt the longer they ride around on your car dashboard, waiting for the day you finally stop by the post office to send them. I am at work on Novel 2 and almost completely disconnected from Internet Reality (which is to say from Publishing News Reality, Writing Advice Reality, Author Blog Reality, and yes, Funny Cat Video Reality) but I can feel things collecting in my brain for future sharing here, piling up like snow. A typical day for me right now goes something like this: Wake up. Coffee/Breakfast Write until afternoon. Walk around public gardens while groundskeepers in bright orange vests blow whistles and gesticulate madly for no apparent reason. Develop fever. Hurry home to toss and turn in strangely pleasant delirium. Nip around the corner in search of medicinal oranges; r…

Writing is a job like any other. I
write every day.It's only professional.I write from 4 AM to 7 AM.Writing is a job.
I
didn't write yesterday, or the day before that.

Then
I do the blogging and social media stuff at night.It's only professional.If you don't treat it like a job, you'll
never succeed.Writing is— It's
only—

I don't
have an industrial body. It doesn't shut down at night and start up again in
the morning like it's "supposed" to, clean-faced and ready for
another day's labor. Sometimes, it doesn't shut down for nights and nights, and
I berate it and throw pills at it until it lurches to a diseased kind of
slumber, only to emerge into a diseased kind of waking, howling with hurt and
betrayal like a grizzly bear waking up in a cage.

"Stupid
body," I tell it. "I need you to sleep you so I can wake up so I can
go to my job. I haven't worked in two…

A few days ago, the Guardian posted this handy guide to decoding publishers' euphemisms at the London Book Fair:We don't have sales numbers yet – trust us, you don't want to know I loved the opening – boy, the middle needs work National publicity and marketing campaign – there's no budget, so you're on your own I've read the book – I've had it read
To which INTERN would like to add:

Queriers' Euphemisms:

This is my first novel:

I have nine other manuscripts in various stages of completeness sitting on my hard drive: three hilariously angsty ones I wrote in highschool, three hilariously pretentious ones I wrote in college, two post-college attempts at science fiction that ran into unsolvable plot snarls somewhere around the Xxordon Galaxy, and a NaNo about two old ladies who sneak around shooting people with poison darts.

This is my first novel that's really, actually ready to query. At least, I think it is. *deep breath*

When you're revising a novel, it's easy to lose objectivity become so delusional you can't tell if you've just created a stinking mountain of goat poop or written the next Grapes of Wrath. Each scene starts to read like a passage in a holy text—or does it just feel that way because you've read it so many times the words are looping through your brain like a mantra?

Fear not! INTERN is here to help. Here's INTERN's handy guide to figuring out when it's time to hit the delete key and write that scene again.

10. The scene is not really a scene.

Your scene is not a scene if nothing has changed by the end of it.Your scene is not a scene if there was no internal or external conflict, no matter how subtle.Your scene is not a scene if you were too timid to let anything dangerous happen.Your scene is not a scene if you were too cautious to let anything unexpected happen.Your scene is not a scene if the reader is banging her head against the wall saying “What wa…

A little while ago, INTERN posted about a fictitious Character Transformation Bazooka which could make characters have deep realisations and catharses instantly, with no justification.

There are a few other weapons of mass manuscript destruction (WMMD) in the arsenal.

One is the Triumph Bomb, or T-Bomb.

If you go see just about any movie that's playing in a mainstream theatre, there's bound to be at least one scene involving a Moment of Triumph: the submarine crew realizes they've fixed their leaking vessel just in time (hugs, shouts, and meaningful apologies ensue) or a pair of starcrossed mental defectives realizes they're meant for each other and triumphantly race to the nearest marriage office.

These moments of triumph usually happen after about ninety minutes of false starts, dissapointments, and disasters.

One comment INTERN finds herself writing frequently in novel critiques is that the moments of triumph in the story come too soon, or make no sense, or seem to dr…

Over the past three years, INTERN has written manuscript
critiques for many would-be authors, of whom some have gone on to find
representation, go on submission, and basically get the publishing ball
rolling, and some have not (at least, not yet).
One of the neat things about freelance editing is that you get to be a fly on
the wall throughout other writers’ journey towards publication, and INTERN has
observed some interesting patterns amongst her clientele. Here are some factors
that differentiate the soon-to-be-agented writers from the writers who have a
little further to go. 1. They’ve been at it
for a while.
In INTERN’s experience, the novel that lands the agent is almost never a client’s first manuscript. In fact, the
clients who get in touch with one of those ecstatic “OMG agent!!!” e-mails a
few months down the road have almost
always written two or three other manuscripts, and perhaps even done a
round of querying for one of them before deciding to move on.
See also Querying …

Publisher Shells Out for
Crime Novel by Retired English Teacher in “Nice” DealSmall Press Throws Down for
Middle-Aged Poet’s Chapbook in Three-Figure Deal47-Year-Old Mother of Three
Sells Debut Novel in 1-Book DealTrade Publisher Quietly
Acquires Midlist Author’s Sixth Romance Novel in Low-Key DealVenerable Press Finally
Makes Offer on Literary Novel It Has Been Sitting On For Eleven and a Half
Months** Friends: publishing is not
all six-book mega-deals and twenty-year olds winning national book awards. Most book deals are small-to-medium, and
most people getting book deals are not teenaged geniuses, contrary to what you read online.

You are valid if you are 20 or 32 or 47 or 64 or 71, if your advance is three hundred bucks or ten thousand, if you are fashionably obscure or completely unknown. The models are Photoshopped. Love, INTERN.

INTERN is feeling extremely wonderful and happy today and wanted to fill the world with yes's instead of no's, do's instead of don'ts. Here, then, are the ten most wonderful and useful things you can do you for your manuscript to give it the best possible chance of growing up big and strong.

1. Revise until there is no "anyway".

The single most common reason that reasonably good manuscripts get turned down (at least, as far as INTERN has observed) is because a writer had an exciting idea, wrote a kinda promising book with a lot of flaws, tried to fix the flaws, gave up, and submitted it anyway.

Never submit it anyway.

"Anyway" is an otherwise promising manuscript's worst enemy. And a manuscript that has been tinkered with until its eyeballs bleed and then submitted anyway screams like a mandrake when pulled out of its envelope. Would you try to fix your car's brakes, get frustrated, and drive it anyway? No? Point made!

Last night, INTERN was chatting with a writer-friend about all things bookish, and they got to talking about agents. How the internet is stuffed with advice about snagging one (always snagging!) but goes curiously silent after the proverbial wedding day, like so many fairy tales. Just like the (presumably awkward) deflowering scene that happens off-stage in those fairytales, there's something the internet doesn't tell you about agents: Having An Agent Is Weird.

Why is having an agent the most awkward thing ever if you've never done it before?

It's a bit like dating your first boy/girlfriend.

If you are the least bit neurotic, you will constantly ask yourself "Do we talk enough? Am I too needy? Too distant? Amy and Brad call each other, like, every hour. Should I fly to NYC to visit him?"

You are the least bit self-doubty, you will wonder, "Does she/he really like me? Does he regret going out with me? Is he just waiting for the right moment to dump me? Is sh…